Butch and femme

Butch and femme are terms used to describe individual gender identities in the lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and cross-dressing subcultures to ascribe or acknowledge a masculine (butch) or feminine (femme) identity with its associated traits, behaviors, styles, self-perception and so on. The terms were founded in lesbian communities in the early twentieth century. This concept has been called a "way to organize sexual relationships and gender and sexual identity". Assuming butch-femme culture is a lesbian dyadic system denies the personal experiences of many women in butch–butch and femme–femme relationships.

Both the expression of individual lesbians of butch and femme identities and the relationship of the lesbian community in general to the notion of butch and femme as an organizing principle for sexual relating have varied over the course of the 20th century. Some lesbian feminists have argued that butch–femme is simply a replication of heterosexual relations while other commentators argue that, while it resonates with heterosexual patterns of relating, butch–femme simultaneously challenges it. Research in the 1990s in the United States showed that "95% of lesbians are familiar with butch/femme codes and can rate themselves or others in terms of those codes, and yet the same percentage feels that butch/femme was "unimportant in their lives"".